The Aviator

12, Buena Vista, DVD (2 discs) £22.99

New York, New York

PG, MGM Home Entertainment, £19.99

Martin Scorsese's majestic The Aviator comes out on DVD in the same week as a splendid special edition of his unique, neglected New York, New York of 1977. The star-studded glamour and epic sweep of The Aviator's portrayal of the first two decades of Howard Hughes's astonishing career as a filmmaker, womaniser, inventor and flyer might be taken to indicate that we're in the glossy realms of the biopic, and shouldn't expect anything too emotionally challenging. But New York, New York powerfully reminds us that Scorsese has always stretched the normal constraints of genre.

Scorsese and Robert De Niro went from the extremes of Taxi Driver to what might have seemed a conventional, nostalgic subject - a musical about the relationship between a popular female singer and a jazz saxophonist, starring Liza Minnelli and shot on the same sound stages as the great MGM musicals.

In fact, the production was anything but "safe" - it was close, indeed, to the uncompromising, truth-seeking, uncommercial "kamikaze way of making movies" that Scorsese has spoken of with regard to his next fictional feature, Raging Bull.

In New York, New York, Scorsese consciously combined the glossy "retro" look of a big studio picture (shot with deliberate artifice and stylisation) with the emotional rawness and experimental, improvisatory Method of a later generation. Charting the destructive paradoxes of the love between Jimmy Doyle (De Niro) and Francine Evans (Minnelli), he keeps nudging the visual escapism and showbiz uplift of a musical towards the dark psychological exposures of John Cassavetes's naturalistic, no-holds-barred dramas.

Cinematographer László Kovács confesses in a DVD interview that he couldn't watch one terrifyingly violent quarrel scene in the film being shot, and had to slip outside: "Emotionally, it was too much for me." Scorsese's intuition, brilliantly justified by the funny, moving result, was that, despite their surface blandness, the codes of the old studio style often connected with more complex and adult truths.

At 170 minutes, The Aviator is a touch longer than New York, New York. But its entertaining, richly detailed story of a flawed, heroic American prince hurtles past as thrillingly as Hughes himself, "the fastest man on the planet", in his sleek, dazzling H-1 plane of 1935 (the flying scenes, where CGI allows planes to fly "through" the camera, incomparably convey the visceral appeal of aviation).

Leonardo DiCaprio, whose genius seemed rather rebuked in Gangs of New York beside the magnificent Daniel Day-Lewis, catches splendidly here the defiant swagger of a man whose vast wealth, talent and good looks put the world at his feet and allow him to impose his vision on it - changing our world in ways we may, with hindsight, feel equivocal about. He's also painfully fragile, especially in his one really reciprocated love relationship, with Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett).

The script by John Logan (Gladiator), whose films have often been allegories of decent American values under threat from capitalism, beautifully paces its introduction of Hughes's psychological tics and troubles into the triumphant public record - the passion for cleanliness, the paranoia, the liability to get stuck on obsessive-compulsive repetition of a phrase. Thus his inner damage comes to seem a measure of his genuine heroism, as in the final, rousing Senate hearings where he emerges from mania and seclusion to confront the corrupt Owen Brewster (Alan Alda); and yet it is also a warning sign about the dark sources of his competitive drive to accelerate the world's Icarean ascent into technological-corporate modernity.

The Aviator is, in the end, a scarily prophetic film, and his unstable mixture of madness and method makes Hughes himself an ominous representative - as the film's last, echoing line announces - of "the way of the future". Philip Horne

Criminal

15, Warner Bros, £15.99

The distasteful Hollywood habit of taking a perfectly decent foreign film and remaking it as a big-budget American crowd-puller, has yielded mixed results. For every Insomnia (Christopher Nolan's enthralling retelling of a Scandinavian thriller), there's a Vanilla Sky, the vacuous Cameron Crowe rehash of the Spanish dazzler Abre los ojos.

Sadly, Criminal, Gregory Jacobs's remake of zippy Argentine crime-caper Nine Queens (Optimum, £10.99), belongs firmly in the latter tradition. The story of a con-artist (John C Reilly) and sidekick (Diego Luna) attempting to pull off the greatest scam of their careers here looks leaden and inconsequential. Reilly is a great talent, but - in a role that cries out for the studied suavity of George Clooney (one of the film's producers) - his brand of furrowed-brow incredulity is badly misplaced. And Mexican Luna, whose casting feels like a token nod to the film's Latino roots, fares little better.

There are memorable moments: in her sporadic scenes as Reilly's smarter sister, Maggie Gyllenhaal is typically watchable, an injection of pace as the film approaches its tricksy climax. But an over-arching flatness leaves one longing for the fizz of the original. No extras. Benjamin Secher

Gallivant

15, BFI, £18.99

Andrew Kotting is one of the most restless and searchingly innovative directors working in Britain today. He mines much the same psycho-geographic terrain as documentary-maker Patrick Keiller and writer Iain Sinclair, but in a more playful, idiosyncratic fashion.

Gallivant, his best-known work, is a travelogue like no other. Kotting goes on a coastal trip around Britain with his octogenarian grandmother and his young daughter Eden, who suffers from Joubert's Syndrome, which means that she has problems communicating. The journey, at once larky and epic, becomes part skewed homage to national eccentricity, and part emotional voyage around the ties that bind his family.

The film's avant-garde visual repertoire, including found footage and time-lapse photography, and its striking sound design signal clearly that the trio of bumbling pilgrims are pursuing not transcendence through nature, but scratchier, earthier truths.

The BFI's excellent double-DVD set includes 11 Kotting shorts that reach back as far as the early 1980s, as well as Visionary Landscapes - a split-screen remix of Gallivant - and a great essay by Iain Sinclair about the British road-movie genre. It all adds up to an eye- and heart-opening treat. Sukhdev Sandhu

A Very Long Engagement

15, Warner, DVD £19.99

Like his earlier Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's expensive, enjoyable follow-up stars a radiantly innocent and obsessive Audrey Tautou, this time as its ever-hopeful heroine Mathilde. It's a dazzling romantic epic of the French experience in and after the First World War. Couched as a detective quest and a love story, bristling with moustaches, jalopies, steam trains and high emotions, the film arrestingly dramatises - or elegises - the values of an old France with such delirious modern techniques as CGI, tinted filters and hectic editing. Its swooping, weaving, soaring camera, and its intricate tissue of interlocking, striking episodes (revenges, dreams, miraculous escapes, discoveries of documents), amount to a piece of highly acceptable magic realism.

It delivers a decided, if belated, Non to the French officer class of Maréchal Pétain: the central episode being investigated is a hushed-up official "execution" of shell-shocked French soldiers for self-mutilation in 1917 (to get off service at the Somme) - by sending them out to die in no-man's-land. The film simultaneously constitutes an enormous Oui to French traditions - of the countryside, of Parisian bustle, of village life, of taking food seriously, and of excessive passion. Philip Horne

Smile

No cert, Warners, 2 DVDs, £24.99

Thirty-seven years in the making, Brian Wilson's Smile was worth waiting for: finally released last year, the album has rightly been described as his masterpiece. Now comes this double DVD. Disc one has David Leaf's devotional documentary about Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the making of Smile: a touch hagiographic, perhaps, but a very moving film that unfolds beautifully, with observations from just about anyone who's anyone in popular music, and lucid contributions from Wilson himself. On disc two, there's live concert footage of Wilson and his peerless band doing the whole of Smile, shot and directed with a real appreciation for the musicians' absolute attention to detail. Fantastic.

Extras? Well, there's Wilson at work in the studio recording Smile, footage that will finally put paid to any remaining suggestions that he is still half man, half fruitcake. And then there are the audience reactions to the Smile première at the Festival Hall in 2004. Most are lost for words; some describe it almost as some kind of religious experience.

A commendable package that explains why this remarkable piece of music has meant so much to so many people. David Cheal

Return to the Batcave

12, Anchor Bay, £16.99

"The mystery continues!" says Adam West, lashed with Burt Ward to a chimney-sized stick of comedy dynamite. "But given these camera angles I'd say that the villain is close at hand!"

The line is typical of this feather-light straight-to-DVD romp, as frothy as Christopher Nolan's new Batman Begins is fiery. West and Ward - formerly Batman and Robin in the camply stylised TV series - see their cherished Batmobile pinched from a charity gala, and, playing themselves, go on the trail of the thief. But the clue clearly lies in the past ("Holy plot-twist!"), and so the film cuts repeatedly between the duo's present "quest" and the late 1960s, with two look-fairly-alikes playing their younger selves as they shoot the series.

There's a childish if faintly tragic pleasure in seeing the weathered and self-mocking West and Ward united once more, and the only partly fictionalised "early days" are gentle fun too. The sight of the thrilled actors looking round their characters' newly-built hide-out c1966 could well bring a Batlump to the throat of the series' more committed fans. And, given that more than two decades after the show wrapped it was still showing in 106 countries to an audience of 400 million, there may still be plenty of them. Mark Monahan